By Sherin Samuel
How To:
Be Fashionable
and Sustainable
1. Change Your Mindset
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Being sustainable does not mean that you have to actually go out and continue to shop at sustainable stores only, it can mean choosing alternatives to shopping and changing shopping habits. When it comes to sustainable fashion brands, many of them are at higher price points than fast fashion brands since they are ethical. Dr. Kozlowski says we as consumers need to expand our view on what sustainable fashion means.
“It's not just something that you have to engage in consumption, but it's just rewearing everything that you already have and finding different ways of switching that up,” Dr. Kozlowski says.
This can be done by restyling your wardrobe by updating current pieces that you already have in your closet. Which leads into the next point…
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Having a tailor make changes to your clothing is not as expensive as people think. Finding a local tailor that knows what you want can be vital in updating your current clothes to enhance it to the current style of today. This can be hemming pant bottoms to match the current trend of “cropped pants.” This will advance those pieces in your wardrobe that you love but might be outdated.
Listed below are local tailors in the Long Island area who are affordable. For example “Designs by Rosie’s Tailoring” ranges from $6 - $12 to hem pants.
2. Form a Relationship With Your Local Tailor
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Sarah-Jayne Smith, Founder of Magpies and Peacocks
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Smith says that “Defining who you are might be the first thing in your journey to sustainability; individuality is actually what we're all in search for.”
Don't let labels and fashion trends define your style. Try to see what works for your body and yourself without the confinements of what designers say what you should be wearing. Individuals are the ones who help designers make or break trends, find power in your individuality and the uniqueness of your own style.
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4. Build Your Closet With Basics
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If you can't help but want to add a few things to your wardrobe, try to buy things that you can continue to wear for years to come. For example, items that are of higher quality in which you will be able to mix and match with other clothes in your closet easily.
Berry says this about investing in high quality pieces, “Make a list for the year, January to December. Pick five quality pieces to invest in…narrow it down to what you're gonna use the most that year. It could simply be a blazer and a black cocktail dress that you're going to spend the money on that is sustainable, ethically made that costs a bit more.”
She also emphasized to be considerate of whether that piece can be worn during both the day and night and dressed up or down.
3. Find your Identity
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5. Borrow And/or Swap
Borrowing clothes from your family and friends is a great way to avoid adding items to the shopping cart. If they want something out of it as well, you can both look at each other's closet and see whether you want to get rid of items that they may want.
This is especially useful when it comes to events with a more expensive dress code such as a gala or a formal party. Instead of buying a new $200 dress or suit, you can see whether any friends or family have one that they've most probably only ever worn once or twice.
6. If You Can Afford It, Skip the Fast Fashion
As with thrift stores, some people shop at fast fashion because they quite literally cannot afford to buy clothes anywhere else. If you can afford to buy at shops other than fast fashion, it's probably best to shop at a more sustainable store that might cost more. If you’re saying to yourself “well I can't afford to buy 15 pairs of jeans at a sustainable fashion brand because it would cost $300 rathert than $100 at a fast fashion website,” think to yourself whether you need all those 15 jeans.
“The people who have to buy cheap clothes, they're not the problem in the first place. They are not the people that have made fast fashion brands into billionaires. It's the people who can afford a vast array of stuff because they're going into H&M and they're dropping $1,000 because they want, you know, 100 items or whatever, ” says Dr. Kozlowski.
7. Thrift but Quit the Haul
Thrifting has been growing popular in recent years for its cheapness. Even though thrifting is sustainable, if you're shopping in an overconsumption behavior at thrift shops it is not true sustainability, says Dr. Kozlowski.
“If you're going on a thrift haul and you're still buying in the same way that you would fast fashion, then nothing's really changing about your behavior...Because if you're going in there and you're buying 20 pieces the same way that you would walk into an H&M and buy 20 pieces, what's different? You're still going in there, you're seeing cheap prices and you're getting caught up in the low price point and you're still buying on volume as opposed to one piece, ” says Dr. Kozlowski.
While there is a vast amount of second hand clothing, if everyone goes into a thrift store and buys in large masses, there might not be enough good quality clothing for consumers who have no other option than to shop at thrift since that's the only affordable price point for them. So being aware of splurging shopping habits when you go into any store, including thrift shops is imperative.
8. Don't Shop For A year
For some, breaking the habit of shopping and overconsumption might need to happen abruptly. Skinner advises that making the choice not to shop for a year will guide you into valuing your clothes.
“If you want to be a more sustainable person, as it relates to fashion, simply don't buy anything for a year. Accept that challenge and just say ‘I'm not going to buy anything new for a year, I'm going to figure out how to relate to the clothes that I have, even if they're not great quality. I'm going to learn how to remake them myself or take them to somebody in town who can do that.’ Maybe even through that process, you'll understand why this is so difficult for people in Kantamanto to resell and come to value clothing completely differently,” Skinner said.
Skinner emphasizes breaking the correlation that sustainability in fashion has to be related to where you're spending money or how much money you're spending. This might even help consumers break the cycle of buying on impulse whenever they see a pretty top or bottom they take interest in, assisting them in gaining a will to rethink whether they really need it.
9.Think
Before
You Donate
Before donating that top that might have a stain or rip in it, see whether you can reuse it as something else. That shirt could be useful as a rag or can turn into a different article of clothing if you give it to your local tailor to reinvent.
Avoid giving very low quality clothing to donation shops, as they may end up in dumps such as the one in Accra, Ghana. If worst comes to worst and you can not think of any way to upcycle that damaged article of clothing…throw it out.
“I would rather see things thrown out in an American United States landfill, then end up here [Ghana]. The reality is that the United States of America has much better landfilling practices, where people spend a huge amount of money to engineer leachate catchment to ensure that things are not ending up in the ocean and that we are not getting microplastics from polyester on the beaches in our food stream. We cannot guarantee that that's not going to happen in Ghana, In fact, it does happen all the time,” says Skinner.
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10. It’s Okay if You’re not Automatically Sustainable
Gaining sustainable habits takes time. If one day you indulge in fast fashion, after not partaking in months, acknowledge what you did but move on to try to be sustainable again.
“We're human beings, we're not perfect. There's this narrative of perfection and immediacy, but no this is a process. We all love to shop and that's a reality. We live in a world that wants us to do this literally every second of the day. So it's okay, in the journey to be better you're going to be a hypocrite and you're going to contradict yourself,” says Dr.Kozlowski.
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